Founding Fathers – Memphis Flyer

The Orpheum

Scene from ‘Hamilton’

Hamilton bounced into the national consciousness four years ago, first Off-Broadway in February 2015, and at Broadway’s Richard Rodgers Theatre the following August. Critics swooned, advance box office sales broke records. The show earned 16 Tony nominations and won 11, and on and on. Its success came from Lin-Manuel Miranda (lyrics, music, and book) and his understanding of what makes great musical theater and how to artfully break the rules.

In the years since, it’s conquered Broadway and started a national tour, coming this week to the Orpheum for a comparatively long run through July 28th. It earned its stripes with a fresh take on a good old American story line: Immigrants come to the New World and carve out a new nation rooted in rationalism and humanity with respect for its citizens. Okay, the white, male, non-native, land-owning citizens, but still. Except Hamilton flips it all and casts mostly non-white actors as the Founding Fathers and their wives. Genius.

Four years can be a long time, however, as in the length of a presidential term. What was born in the Obama era as an innovative take on the origins of the United States has now found itself on a very different stage. It’s the same story, yes, and if you think you’ll like a well-scripted musical heavily reliant on hip-hop but with ample R&B, pop, soul, and good ol’ show tunes, you’ll enjoy it, maybe even be moved by it.

But today you can’t help but experience it with the knowledge that the nation these people fought and died to create is deeply corrupted. The country was cobbled together by imperfect people with imperfect results, but they were doing it in the Age of Reason, a time when there was thoughtful discourse and a desire to crush tyranny. For the most part, they set up processes that would allow the country to evolve while keeping its character and integrity.

Hamilton, though, also shows the beginnings of what we have today, a government that has scant philosophy, since it runs on the energy of partisan warfare. Power to the party that gets it and holds it by any means necessary. The musical skewers the machinations of the post-Washington politicians — Jefferson, Madison, and Burr in particular — as they jockeyed for influence. But there are plenty of others to indict, then and now.

You may well come out of the musical with a good feeling, as it is a sharply directed, well choreographed, smartly written story of passions. But though it wasn’t intended when it debuted a short lifetime ago, it now also gives the theater-goer something else to carry. In a country where cruelty is mandated by the executive, where ethics at the federal level are shredded, where reason has been abandoned, where truth is fluid, let Hamilton be a call to arms to revive the era of American Enlightenment.

Amendment I. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

The foregoing words are those of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, an afterthought, as it were, to the hard work, good intentions, and labored-over compromises of the delegates from 13 heretofore independent colonies that had presumed to be independent states of the European kind and had adhered up to that point to a looser compact, the so-called Articles of Confederation.

It was taken for granted by the representatives in Philadelphia of these far-flung entities that the casual sort of association created by the Articles just wouldn’t do to protect the newly won independence of any or all of them. That is why they had agreed to meet in convention and why they availed themselves of guidance from the likes of George Washington, the military leader who had guided their revolt against British authority, and Jefferson, Madison, Adams, and the rest of those illustrious sorts who, in our own time, go by the name of Founding Fathers.

It was recognized that the 13 states so joined would have conflicting interests, the most obvious of which was slavery, an institution so glaringly in conflict with the ideals of a “more perfect union” that it would need, ultimately, to be abolished by the sword, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, North and South, and of an economic devastation of the latter territory that would take a century or more to repair.

Once that Civil War was ended and the union restored, virtually the first order of business was a series of new constitutional amendments, the 13th through 15th, all designed to safeguard the “new birth of freedom” that a martyred president had spoken of in the course of the war.

Interpreting those new anti-slavery amendments has, all things considered, been the major focus of Supreme Court concern ever since, and resistance to them has, more or less successfully, been contained by the liberty of expression guaranteed in that very first amendment cited above. Differences of opinion on the subject of equality still do exist, unfortunately, and they are protected by that amendment.

There are limits to free expression, however, and the Court’s 1919 decision in Schenck v. United States, spells them out succinctly as prohibiting dangerous speech, defined by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes as “shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theater.”

Last weekend’s actions by the faux confederates and neo-Nazis who bore torches and arms to Charlottesville, Virginia, in a deranged last stand in defiance of both equality and free discourse, an un-peaceable assembly that began in violence and ended in murder, was clearly well beyond the limits prescribed by Justice Holmes, and it is likely to generate an updated definition of the limits of public expression.

We do not have to guess at the consequences of such actions, after all. The legacy of the aforesaid Civil War and the ravages of the Second World War are testament enough to them.